


why the dog howls at the moon

by tozier



Category: Girl Meets World
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, literally nothing but fluff, the others are Discussed but not featured
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 05:06:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15089654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tozier/pseuds/tozier
Summary: Prompt: things you said under the stars and in the grass.





	why the dog howls at the moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meminger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meminger/gifts).



> title from dela by johnny clegg & savuka.

“C’mon, dude, it’s _cold.”_

“Lucas, stop being a wimp,” Maya sighs from her place beside him on the trampoline. “If you’re gonna keep bitching and moaning, go back inside and measure your dick to Farkle’s again and let us have our peace.”

“We’ve never done that!”

“Sure you haven’t. Or better yet, go make us some pasta. We’re hungry, aren’t we, Riles?”

“Mmm.” Riley only snuggles closer into Maya, burying her face even further into the warmth of her skin.

“Whatever. Farkle’s right, we’re just getting eaten alive by mosquitos out here and will probably get frostbite.”

“Lucas, it’s April in Upstate New York. It’s 45 degrees out. We’re not gonna get  _frostbite_.” Maya snorts when she turns her head to find Lucas laying next to her, arms crossed with his hands shoved underneath his armpits in an attempt to keep them warm, back rigid. “The city's made you go soft, huh? What, a li’l Texas boy like yerself can’t handle the fearsome outdoors?”

“Yeah, Lucas,” Riley giggles, voice muffled by Maya’s sweatshirt. “What’s a country boy t’do?” The accent she uses is significantly worse than Maya’s, but it makes Lucas and Maya smile anyway. Riley could do pretty much anything and it would make Lucas and Maya smile.

“You, too, Riley?” Lucas asks, eyebrows raised.

“Maya’s right! You were so used to hot weather for so long, and it almost never snows in the city. All that smog has you spoiled.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely spoiled,” Maya agrees with a conspiratory grin. “Save yourself, Huckleberry! Go on without us! Leave us to die of exposure! At least we'll be together, like those two idiots from The Titanic!”

“Please, Lucas! You must make it to dry land and tell our story!” Riley cries, making Maya snort and nearly break character.

“Okay, I’m going,” Lucas laughs as he gets off the trampoline, jostling the girls. “But not because you told me to. Spring Break Lucas does what he wants and is not bossed around by his friends like he usually is.”

“Sure. As long as Spring Break Lucas still makes that delicious Three-Cheese Chicken Penne that Regular Lucas is so fond of.” Lucas just shrugs, but he’s grinning, and calls out to Farkle who Maya can see reading on the recliner to start boiling water. Riley and Maya hear _do it yourself, I'm not your maid!_ from inside, and they both laugh as the door opens, flooding them with light briefly before it closes and submerges them in darkness once again.

The facades fall. The calm settles.

Without Lucas, without anyone else, when it’s just Riley and Maya, it’s usually quiet. Hushed voices, soft touches, everything draped in silken fabric that mutes the outside world. They don’t notice the cars backfiring outside, or the yelling from the Morgensterns down the hall, or the sycamore tree scraping outside the window. Usually when it’s just Riley and Maya, they’re in the Bay Window, and the drapes and curtains always make the world seem softer somehow, safer.

Or maybe it’s just Riley and Maya who do that.

Maya thinks for a moment about how safe she feels right now, wrapped up in her best friend at her step-father’s house upstate. Riley talks sometimes about how this place looked before Maya ever saw it: drab, lifeless, boring. No pictures on the walls—not even any that Shawn took himself—no area rugs, no interesting furniture. It looked like a house and not a home.

But then Cory started visiting more once Riley was old enough to take the train without getting nervous, and Topanga would stay home with Auggie while Cory and Riley would visit Shawn. They’d always bring something along when they went. Something permanent. A photostrip from the boys’ childhoods, or a drawing of a cat Riley made on the train ride up, all jagged lines and the kind of innocence they all thought she’d have to lose eventually.

The picture of the cat Riley drew at age nine is still up on the fridge, and it has the same lack of finesse that her art still has today. But that’s the thing Maya admires most about Riley: she never lets being terrible at something stop her from doing it. Maya knows if she hadn’t had a natural talent for art, she would’ve never pursued it, even if she knew how much she loved it. Fear of failure and rejection runs so deep in her that she thinks it must be paramount to her personality at this point. She doesn’t know who she’d be without it.

But she doesn’t need to; at least, not for the next four years. She is going to the Tisch School of the Arts in the fall, and this is their group’s last spring break together. Maya, Zay, Lucas, Farkle, Riley and Smackle have all been going to Shawn’s cabin every spring since their freshman year of high school. The first two years, Cory demanded that Shawn come along to 'babysit'. Shawn ditched them to go hiking both years, and once Cory caught wind of this and the fact that nothing even remotely scandalous had happened while Shawn was absent, he allowed the six of them to go the next year unsupervised.

Most of the time, when the six of them are together, it’s chaos. They’re all loud personalities, and being cooped up in a tiny house for five days doesn’t usually go swimmingly. Last year, they nearly burned the place down when Zay and Maya got into a “flaming sword battle” with burning marshmallows on sticks. The year before that, Smackle and Riley got into an all-out fight over whether or not Buzzfeed quizzes were stupid or not. Riley told Smackle she doesn’t know how to have fun, and Smackle called Riley shallow, and Riley cried, and it took two whole excruciating days for them to start talking again. Lucas, their mediator in a pinch when Riley is unavailable, couldn’t even solve it. It ended up being Zay who finally put an end to it by telling them he was sick of needing to choose sides. They’re all friends, and they need to act that way.

Riley apologized first, which still infuriates Maya to this day, and that was the fight that caused the biggest rift between Smackle and Farkle, even moreso than the many they had behind closed doors. He confided to Maya during their weekly ritual of coffee and conversation that he couldn’t stop thinking about how torn apart Riley was by being called shallow by his own girlfriend, one of Riley's best friends. He thought Smackle cared more about her than that; she'd cried for her when she thought Riley was leaving. It didn't make sense to him. Fariel and Maya never talk about his and Smackle's relationship unless Farkle directly brings it up, so she knew it really must've been eating at him.

Things became even more strained between the two of them after that, and their breakup came ten months later; it was more drawn out than anything Maya has ever seen. Worse than when Lucas thought there was something romantic between them. Worse than her false-god crush on Josh that was strung out to its last dying breath until _Alan fucking Matthews_ sat her down and asked if she was okay and if his son was hurting her. The reality of the situation sunk in then, how she had been chasing him to ignore a much larger truth, and her come-to-Jesus moment about her sexuality came shortly after.

It was worse than… anything.

It’s still bad despite a full year having passed since the split between their friends was finalized in an oddly formal gathering where they told them about the literal _treatise_ they signed. They’re all still friends—Smackle is currently inside watching Animal Planet with Zay—but it’s strained. Strange. Maya can tell that Smackle feels even more left out than she did when she was on the outside of the group looking in, even though they all invite her wherever they go. Lucas has been dancing around both Farkle and Zay with long looks and stolen glances—the same long looks that Farkle himself gives to everyone he’s friends with, falling in love more easily and freely than he’d ever be able to quantify scientifically. The same long looks that Maya has been giving Riley since the day they met.

Maya is tired. She just wants everything to be alright. She wants to paint and see her friends happy and to kiss her best friend on the mouth. Apparently, the world only wants her to do one of those things.

But even if she can’t kiss her, Maya is happy with Riley. She always is. There's no loss not having her in every way she wants; she's always had most of Riley anyway. Being with Riley in any state is better than being with anyone else. Even without the Bay Window, without cars backfiring and people screaming, they’re still safe. There’s stars to blanket them now instead of drapes, and bullfrogs from the pond just through the woods to talk back to them instead of car horns. No matter where they go, they’re still Riley and Maya. Riley is Maya’s best friend on earth, she always has been, and she knows that will never change.

Which is why she should’ve known that kissing her wouldn’t change it either.

“Hey, Maya?” Riley prompts sleepily from her place on Maya’s shoulder. Maya hums, lost in her own thoughts. “Why are cicadas so loud?”

“What're you asking me for?” Maya snorts. “There are two perfectly good scientists right inside who I’m sure would be happy to ramble for hours about the etymology of cicadas.”

Unlike anyone else—because Riley is very much unlike everyone else in every way she possibly can be—she doesn’t note Maya’s usage of a two-dollar word. Instead, she ignores the answer entirely, still trapped in her thought process.

“Do you think they’re screaming?” It almost makes Maya laugh that Riley continued on as if Maya hadn’t said anything until she realizes that Riley knew all too well what she had proposed and how awkward it is for her to talk to both of those scientists right now for vetsy different reasons. She sees the long looks Riley has been giving Farkle for years, and she sees the crafty ways she avoids conversations with Smackle. Maya notices more about Riley than she does anything or anyone else. If Riley were an academic subject, Maya would be a scholar in the field. “It kind of sounds like they’re screaming. I worry about them whenever we come up here. They only make noise at night. Do you think they’re hurt?”

“No, honey. I think it's maybe…” Maya sighs, absently moving Riley’s hair away from her eyes so she can look at the night sky better. Riley’s hand tightens in the sweatshirt she borrowed from Shawn’s closet and turns her head slightly to watch the stars sail across the sky while Maya thinks. “I think maybe they’re singing.”

Riley hums happily at that. “I hope so. Singing a song in their own special cicada language.”

“What songs do you think cicadas would like?” Maya is always glad to distract Riley from the negative thoughts that flit through her mind.

“Oooh… Bad 80s pop songs with weird beats. Yeah, definitely. Like, you know that one that Lucas is always playing?” Riley hums a little bit of it, and then starts singing it choppily. It’s a bit off-key but she’s clearly trying so hard, just like the way she always sings. Maya recognizes it immediately as _Dela_. Riley’s right, Lucas played this song non-stop when he discovered it in his venture into genres that weren’t the country music forced on him his entire childhood. She’s missing a few words here and there, so Maya joins her with a voice a bit less clumsy to fill the blank spaces.

 _“I’ve been waiting for you all my life! Hoping for a miracle. I’ve been waiting day and night, day and night!”_ Riley suddenly sits up and clambers to her feet in that innately clumsy way she always seems to move with and begins jumping as Maya attempts to join her whilst still singing. _“I’ve been waiting for you all my life! Waiting for redemption. I’ve been waiting day and night. I burn for you!”_

Maya bears down hard on the trampoline at the right moment, and Riley sails high into the sky as they loudly finish the chorus of the song. She collapses onto her back with a shrill giggle, momentum bouncing her several times before she comes to rest. Maya joins her once again, a bit breathless, and then Riley looks over at her with her perfect toothy grin and Maya wonders if she’ll ever be able to breathe again.

And then Riley leans over, cups her cheek delicately in the cover of night, and kisses her. Simple, like they’d done it hundreds of times before, and for a moment, Maya thinks maybe they have. Maybe she’s met Riley before this life, with no Bay Window but the same amount of safety. Maybe they kissed then, too, and this is just a continuation of everything they’ve done before. It somehow feels more believable than something this natural being their first kiss. Distantly, Maya can hear _Dela_ playing from the portable speakers inside, and she smiles into the kiss. She cradles Riley’s cheek, and Riley’s other hand rests against her steadily beating heart, and it’s perfect. Maya feels like she can finally breathe again.

Riley pulls back only slightly to look at her, and while Maya knows she’s blushing, Riley is not. Her smile is sweet, candy, like spun taffy that Maya wants to pull at until her smile is all that’s left of her. She looks like she's the only thing that keeps the stars shining. God, Maya wants Riley to be this happy always. It makes her a bit dizzy to know that she has the power to do that for someone who is constantly pushing aside her own happiness for others.

“Always wanted to do that,” Riley says in that quiet, dreamy way she gets sometimes, but only ever around Maya.

Maya nods, and matches Riley’s grin. “Me, too, honey.”

And perhaps it was always as simple as that. Their friends are still a tangled mess of unspoken feelings inside, but under the cover of darkness, her and Riley are just fine. There has never been anything tangled about them, and Maya feels foolish that she ever convinced herself there was.

**Author's Note:**

> here's [other places to find me](http://rebecca.carrd.co).


End file.
